Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi
I was diagnosed 4 months ago, & was a late diagnosed in my 40's. I have always thought everyone had the same struggles & sensory issues that I had & learnt to tolerate a lot of things in my life. I have disclosed my diagnosis to my manager, & was talking to her about my struggles & got shut down & told "everyone feels like that". I struggle to explain how I feel & was one of the few times I have ever opened up at work & I was just shut down. This was a few weeks ago & I keep replaying the conversations & can't figure out how I should respond to comments like this. I know this conversation will come up again, as I have asked for an occupational health referral to discuss reasonable adjustments.
If people have good answers to the everyone feels like that statement or ways to deal with this, I'd love to hear them.
Thank you
Hi, something that went through my mind is maybe this person does feel the same feelings, autistic and just doesn’t realise it yet.
I feel like it's more usually that people don't have the empathy/ imagination to realise how strong feelings can be if they don't personally experience them. Like they feel nervous before giving a presentation and can't imagine how intense that feeling could get for someone else, so they're dismissive and just think that person's being soft.
the problem I have is that I don't feel I'm able to properly describe how I feel or experience a lot of the time. I don't have words for a lot of the "emotions(?)"/sensations. trying to pass information on in terms that people understand feels like I'm packaging them in a way that presents them as just normal, everyday problems everyone has (and maybe they do I mean I can't experience anyone else's world). This is worse if I try to do so in real time, in spoken word as opposed to writing things down where I can iterate over the words and try to shape them into something that more accurately represents what's happening but even then I don't feel like I can do a proper job of it.
I wonder if something like that is happening to an extent.
I have a similar thing trying to describe problems I have to my partner who ends up trivialising them as something everyone has and just need to be got over - but I can't blame her for that as they're not presented in a way that would distinguish them from similar things she's experienced. If that makes sense. Apologies if it doesn't.
yeah i feel that, i cant or dont say anything verbally much and cant explain verbally... but on written text i can write for days and days and be super detailed and write pages and pages of essays on a small short thing lola issue though is that some things youd want to describe you cant, such as anger and describing how angry one can get to the point of hitting objects which causes self harm, that can get you in trouble at work, so it becomes a minefield then to describe or explain to the extent of how you feel because how you feel may get you fired too. which it shouldnt as it should be protected trait under the disability act, but that still didnt stop my employer giving me a disciplinery for describing how i felt so mad at work i hit one of these plastic pallet collars so hard i could have broke my hand.